Skin-to-skin contact with premature babies can ‘significantly enhance’ child interactive behaviours

Jody Coffey

The findings suggest that premature babies tend to benefit the most from skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth.

Heartwarming findings

A study has found that there are several positive impacts for premature babies who are held close to a parent’s skin after birth.

The study, published by the Journal of American Medical Association, proposed that premature babies held directly against their mum or dad’s skin had better communication, social skills, and more positive interactions with their mothers at four months compared to those put in an incubator.

To gather results, researchers from Sweden studied 71 premature babies who were born between 28 and 33 weeks.

These preterm babies were split randomly into two separate groups.

One group received standard care in an incubator and the other group of babies were placed on their mother’s or father’s chest for the first six hours after their birth.

“If we combine the immediate medical care of the very premature babies with a relatively simple intervention such as skin-to-skin contact, it has effects on the infant’s social skills,” Good Morning America reports Jonas Wibke, the senior lecturer and associate professor at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Women’s and Children’s Health, said in a statement.

The findings support earlier data on the positive impacts of skin-to-skin contact and support recent guidelines from the World Health Organisation advising immediate skin-to-skin contact after birth.

This immediate skin-to-skin contact helps keep babies warm and calm, regulates their heart rate and breathing, helps with feeding and decreases infections.

These babies often face challenges later in life with social interaction as their nervous system is not fully developed.

To understand the impacts of skin-to-skin right after birth, social development was assessed by two separate psychologists at four months old by analysing video interaction between the infant and mother.

Researchers found that, on a five-point scale, babies with early skin-to-skin contact had an average score closer to four. This is in contrast to a score of three for babies cared for in an incubator.